In the burgeoning field of disability studies, much
has been, and
continues to be, at stake for those who have been marginalized for
their differences.
In Deaf Studies, scholars have particularly noted the lamentable marginalization
of signers in what one scholar has called a “linguistic
genocide” (205). As a contribution to this fraught history, Reading Victorian
Deafness traces the ideology of "oralism," a phonocentric pedagogical
movement that “force[d] deaf people to speak and lip-read instead of
sign” (2), through
the Victorian period. Exploring the origins and consequences of this
movement, Esmail shows how deaf Victorians viewed language,
disability, and themselves, and
sets this story in a larger context of Victorian attitudes toward
language and difference.

Esmail opens Reading Victorian Deafness
with an extended
discussion of "deaf poetry," that is, poetry by deaf writers “who used
signed languages or
finger-spelling to communicate” (23). Working in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, this group comprised about a dozen writers of various social
and educational backgrounds
who nevertheless “shared a concern that their deafness might preclude
poetic achievement”
(23). They came by these fears honestly, as they faced substantial
prejudice in Victorian
literary culture. In particular, these poets struggled to be taken
seriously because perceptions of
deafness excluded the possibility that the deaf could write poetry at
all. “We should
almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter,
as one born deaf to
produce poetry of even tolerable merit," opined an editor (qtd. on p.
27) who, in 1847, was astonished to
discover what he considered to be a publishable poem, "The Mute's
Lament," by John Carlin,
a deaf poet who plays a leading role in Esmail’s study. In her
sensitive exploration of this
body of work, Esmail exposes the assumption that underpinned the
prejudice: an idea of written
poetry as supervenient on a highly valued fantasy: that poetry
bubbled into existence
through the medium of the poet, who was a conduit for "an original
bardic orality" (43).
Hearing poets, like Tennyson, to
whom voices reportedly spoke even "in the wind" (qtd. on p. 41) "must be more
than superior writers; they must also have a special relationship to
aural experience." (41)
To the extent that the critical establishment took deaf poetry
seriously, deaf poets threatened to undermine the
privileged relationship that was presumed to obtain between written
poetry and the audible
realm of human experience. To them, a deaf poet was a conceptual
impossibility, a contradiction
in terms.

In the next chapter, Esmail wades into the main current of
Victorian literature in order to explore
literary representations of the deaf and of deafness. Her argument turns on a
carefully observed distinction between speaking and signing deaf
literary characters, with the
signing deaf posing a distinctive challenge to Victorian
readers and writers.
According to Esmail, signing deaf people were troubling because they
raised uncomfortable
questions about the meanings of signed, rather than spoken,
language.

On Esmail's reckoning, signing deaf characters appear only twice in all of
Victorian literature: there is Sophy, the heroine of Charles Dickens’
story "Doctor Marigold"
(1865); and there is Madonna, heroine of Wilkie Collins' novel
Hide and Seek (1854,
1861). In contrast, speaking deaf characters, as Esmail points out,
were not at all unusual.
Wemmick’s Aged P, in
Great Expectations, provides just one
instance of this type.
For Esmail, the mystery is not that
deafness should preoccupy Victorian writers but that signing deaf
characters should be so unusual, given how frequently writers
resorted to deafness and other tropes of disability in their "fictions
of affliction," to use Martha
Stoddard Holmes' resonant phrase. Once more, Esmail discovers a
fundamental phonocetrism
sustaining the imbalance. Through
readings of these two key texts by Collins and Dickens, Esmail shows
that "it is, in
particular, a deaf character’s relationship to language that
disqualifies him or her from
conventional representation in Victorian fiction" (70). So, for
instance, when the signing
deaf character speaks in Collins’ novel, she only makes "husky
moaning" noises that,
according to Esmail, challenged the reader to see her not only as
fully human but also,
and perhaps worse, as recognizably feminine. Her "masculinized deaf
voice" (85) alone put
her beyond the bounds of acceptable femininity. Though Esmail does not
beat the reader
over the head with this insight, there is something chilling about the
logical inference
here, that only this character's silence could secure her identity, or
at least its
gendered aspect.

Esmail's argument shifts next to social history as she shows
how Victorians’ views of signed languages helped to
maintain a boundary between animal and human realms, both in literature and
in Victorians' real-world encounters with animals.
Esmail uses
stories of talking animals in zoos and in the fictions of Kipling and Wells to
show how signed languages unsettled this familiar distinction, which
was already under
a certain pressure thanks to the growing influence of Darwin's ideas.
As Esmail observes, Victorians frequently equated signed languages to
vocalizations made by primates;
as signers' preferred mode of communication undermined the animal-human
distinction, it “destabilize[d] the definitions of the human” (104). Although
speaking animals were familiar enough from sensational newspaper
accounts and carnival sideshows, signing humans were infinitely more troubling because signed languages were considered more “corporeal,” and so more debased (118), than speech. Here, again, Victorian commentators privileged speech over other linguistic modalities in a move that preserved the animal-human distinction.

The fear of a perniciously insular deaf community provides
Esmail’s focus in her next chapter, which explores Victorian anxieties about the propagation of deafness through marriage and reproduction as well as the threat posed by wholly separate deaf societies. The result, according to Esmail, was “the pathologization,” through eugenic discourse, “of the deaf body itself,” and the “medicalization of deafness” as an urgent matter of public health (136).
In 1884, Alexander Graham Bell, in his alarmist tract A Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, averred thatm“the practice of sign
language … makes deaf-mutes associate together in adult life, and
avoid the society of
hearing people. It thus causes the intermarriage of deaf-mutes and
their propagation of
their physical defect,” a trend that Bell warned would lead to “the
formation of a deaf
variety of the human race” (qtd. p. 141). Others, such as Jane
Elizabeth Groom and
Jacob Flournoy, saw things differently, and advocated for the
formation of more deaf
communities, particularly in North America, in colonies that were
politically and
economically independent, where “people could thrive outside the reach of audist
prejudice.” (153). Groom’s scheme, and others like it, “boldly
reasserted deaf people’s
control over their own bodies” (157) as well as their language and
their social lives.
Throughout these debates, Victorian commentators proposed deaf
education as an instrument of social control, a
way to manage the unruly signing deaf who preferred their autonomous forms
of communication to spoken and written forms, both of which asked less
of the hearing (143).

In her final chapter, Esmail turns to the intersections between
deafness and the history
of technology in order to show how many sound technologies that we now
take for granted as
part of ordinary life originated from a an extraordinary cultural
preoccupation with
deafness as a threat to social order. Of particular interest here
is Esmail’s presentation of Bell’s
phonoautograph, which used a “dead man’s ear” (185) to reproduce, it
was hoped, the
properties of speech by connecting the vibrations of the tympani to a
stylus that, when
disturbed by a person speaking nearby, left marks on a smoked glass
plate. Although Esmail does not
say much about how technologies like phonoautograph actually worked -- after
sound propagated through the mechanism, how were the
resulting marks decoded? -- her larger point is clear.
The very importance of visuality to the functioning of these devices emphasized
the relevance and naturalness of signed language, which was also
visually apprehended
(186). Nevertheless, Esmail notes that “[w]hile phonoautographic
technology is ostensibly rooted in
visuality, it is only a visuality in service of orality” (187). The technology’s
“prosthetic logic […] seeks to remedy a perceived sensory and
linguistic lack through
technology” (187), rather than question the more fundamental and
problematic assumption of
such a lack in the first place.